March is flying by, it’s already the twenty-eight day of our National Craft Month celebration! It’s time to once again share a new and exciting giveaway and craft tutorial with you! Remember, you can visit our blog every day to enter to win a different prize of the day, but hurry up, there are only 3 chances left to win! Find the contest rules and enter below.

Since it’s day 28 of National Craft Month, our friend Amy Anderson has decided to share her Colorful Button Collage tutorial with you. This project is a great one to make with little ones that love to get crafty! They also make wonderful decorative pieces for kids’ bedrooms. Decorate your little one’s room with a Colorful Button Collage, they’ll love to have something they helped make in their room!

Try making one of these cute collages with the kids. This Colorful Button Collage is a great way to spend some creative time with the family. Plus it’s a simple and inexpensive way to make some home decor!

Today’s prize pack includes a copy of Mod Podge Rocks, Awesome Foam Crafts, Awesome Woodlets, two sets of fabric paint, and two sets of Tulip fabric markers. In order to win today’s prize, all you need to do is:

Happy World Card Making Day! Here at FaveCrafts, we couldn’t contain our excitement for the exciting holiday (well, it’s a holiday to us). During a meeting earlier this month, our team decided to celebrate World Card Making Day by hosting an office card swap!

Here’s what we did for the card swap:

Each person picked the name of a fellow editor out of a bowl.

All card swap participants were tasked with making a homemade card. It could be as creative or innovative as they wanted it to be . Basically, there were no specifics when it came to the cards – the more creative the craft, the better.

On the day of the swap, we each presented our homemade cards, Secret Santa-style.

Here are some of the cards:

FaveDiets editor Matt made AllFreeSewing editor Kirsten a cheese-themed collage card. This is a great way to recycle old magazines and pamphlets.

Simone, director of social media, created a needlepoint spider for her card for AllFreeHolidayCrafts editor Rachel. Yes, you read right. She actually used needlepoint for her card! Such a cool way to mix up craft styles to create a unique project.

AllFreeSewing editor Kirsten made a card for AllFreeBeadedJewelry editor (and daily driver) Maggie. Cards can fit any occasion, not just birthdays or the holidays. A homemade card is a quick, easy and heartfelt way to say you care.

AllFreeKnitting editor Caitlin created this cute owl card for me! She actually knitted the body of the owl and used glue to add buttons and yarn to the card stock! This card has so many pretty colors and textures – I love displaying it on my desk!

Join host Tiffany Windsor and her special guests for a new episode of Cool2Craft TV. This week’s show theme is all about pampering! EcoHeidi Borchers transforms a plain glass canister into a pamper jar with collage, glue embossing and painting. Candace Jedrowicz serves up some lavender shortbread cookies with Pamper Me Tea and Tiffany demonstrates wax resist on Cool2Cast to decorate cork stops for Pamper Me Bath Bottles.

It’s easy to watch Cool2Craft TV right from your computer. It airs Monday June 20, 2011 9am Pacific/10am Mountain, 11 am Central, noon Eastern. Go to http://cool2craft.com and find the Livestream player and chat box. See you Monday!

This guest blog post was written by Trisha Manning.
Everyone wants to take a little piece of paradise home when they return from vacation. That is why souvenirs are so popular. But truly special souvenirs are sometimes hard to find and are usually expensive. One way to take home a one-of-a-kind souvenir and save some money is to create your own souvenir gifts. You don’t have to be a craft wizard to do this since there are many options for creating unique, simple and inexpensive vacation souvenirs. The key is to choose the items that will most remind you of the special moments spent at a special place so that every time you look at them, you can revisit that time.

A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words
This old adage is so true, especially for vacation photos. The best part is that these photos are your own, so they will truly be specific to your experience. Choose a photo or photos stored in your digital camera to print to t-shirts, mugs, calendars, and many other items. Photo collages you can frame also make nice souvenirs, especially if you decorate the frame with reminders of your trip such as ticket stubs. You can even create postcards with these photos and depending where and how long you are on vacation, have them printed and mailed right from the place. Using photos to create a special souvenir is also a great idea for an amusement park vacation. You can purchase some scrap booking supplies and use your printed photos to create a funny retelling of your experience.

Take The Beach Home With You
A beach vacation offers many ways to create your own souvenir. First, you can collect shells and other beach treasures on one of your walks. Don’t forget the sand. With these materials you can create your own beach in jar and bring the ocean back to you each time you look at it. Shells can also become simple earrings, necklaces or bracelets if you either use shells with little holes in them or make tiny holes in them to string together. You can purchase the rest of the things you need to make jewelry at a craft or bead store. How about using the shells to create a wind chime or another hanging ornament? Wire and string are all you will need besides your shells. Or you can decorate a frame with the shells and show off vacation pictures.
Go For That Nature Walk Again and Again
Collect dried flowers, twigs, leaves and rocks. These can be used to make collages you can hang. With some heavy cardboard, glue and your collected treasures you can easily make a collage or representation of your favorite panorama to take home with you. You can also use them to decorate the cover of a travel journal and then keep all your memories and even some photos in it. All these goodies can also be used to create a lasting centerpiece for your home, which will invite questions and give you opportunities to retell about your wonderful vacation.
Put That Art Class to Work
If you enjoy drawing or painting, a wonderful souvenir is to create your own watercolor pieces of the different places you visit. Simply take a small watercolor pad, some brushes and watercolors with you wherever you go and you’ll be set. Sit down somewhere peaceful and comfortable and spend your time not only admiring the view, but creating a special piece to take home with you. Once home, you can frame it and exhibit it, bringing back memories each time you look at it.

Trisha Manning is a traveling and craft enthusiast as well as a contributing writer for Aphrodite Hills, where there are many cyprus properties for sale.

This intermediate craft book by Alma de la Melena Cox is designed for those with an interest in collage using wood and fabric techniques. North Light Books delivers a book with 10 projects and inspiration galleries. Learn more and enter to win a copy here.

Contest ends February 16, 2010. You can enter once daily, so return often to improve your chances of winning!

A well-respected artist and crafter, Rebekah Meier presents an innovate book with 40 mixed media projects. Learn to use fabric in a brand new way and really unleash your creativity. A section on tools is very helpful and if you are an avid crafter, you likely own many of the tools already. We are giving away a copy of the book to one lucky winner. To review the full review and enter to win, see the Fabric Art Collage Giveaway Page.

Contest ends September 8, 2009. You can enter once daily, so return often to improve your chances of winning!

So my fiance and I are looking at getting our first home together. We haven’t gone to any open houses yet, but we’ve been looking online. Our friend has his own house and is re-doing his bathrooms. So we went into Home Depot the other day and came across the paint area. Of course I look at the swatches and ask my fiance what color he wants certain rooms in the house we don’t have. haha. Looking online I found this amazingly cute craft. I never would have thought in a million years to use paint swatches for projects. Once you take them from the store you eventually throw them out, but my gosh are these great ideas! You can use them for Valentine’s Day cards, business card holders or even notebooks. I just can’t get over that someone thought of something like this. It makes me want to just go to the store, pick some up and make a craft.

Another cute craft I never would have thought of myself are little bell decorations. You can create a wedding decoration, something for an anniversary or find another creative way you can use it. If anyone has any other cute crafts like these let me know! I love stuff like this! These cute decorations for Valentine’s Day would also go with great cookies for you Valentine.

Deciding on a good Valentine’s Day gift for your partner can be tough. It may be that you want to avoid those cheesy cards and lacy hearts in Walgreens, it may be that you don’t have the money to spend on something extravagant or it may be that you’ve just started dating and you aren’t sure if a gift is even appropriate. But whatever the problem, this project can solve it.

Oh yeah, and the gift is a collage frame.

This personalized collage frame (photo to come soon) is the first gift I ever gave my boyfriend. (He’s still here two years later if that tells you anything). I had the misfortune of starting a relationship with him a few months before the holiday season. So feeling like I had to do something for Hanukkah, I decided to decorate a frame. It was easy, cheap and somewhat quick. And it also doubles as a great Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Anniversary or Guy Fawkes Day gift.

The project is designed for you to make it your own, but here are the basics.

How to Make a Collage Frame:

1. Buy a plain, solid colored frame (size is up to you) with a smooth surface. I bought a solid black 4 x 6 frame on sale at Macys and if I remember correctly it was well under $10.

2. Grab a stack of magazines and start rummaging. This step will take up the most time. Cut out images, designs and phrases that suit the person you are giving the gift to. Do not cut images and phrases right up to the word or picture. Make sure you leave a sufficient border or area around your cut-outs, so that you have extra to work with when fitting the collage together.

3. Arrange your pictures/words around the frame to get an idea of how they will fit together. It’s a good idea to cut out a few extra pieces of a color you like or a background pattern, to fill in any oddly shaped spaces as you go.

4. Glue your pieces around the frame as desired.

5. To add a glossy shine and to make sure my collage stayed together, I borrowed my (art major) roommate’s acrylic medium. I brushed it over the top of the collage and let it dry. There are many art glazes you could use here, this just happened to be what I had.

6. After the frame dries completely, add your photo. As a personal touch, I wrote a message on the back of the photo.

7. Give to your honey. Watch as their face lights up but his eyes say, “Wow that’s really sweet and personal and all I got you was this $5.99 bouquet of Tulips”

Since Kelly mentioned Chicago’s beloved Renegade Craft Fair, I thought I would mention a major contributor to this fair and a Chicago artist I know quite a lot about, Dolan Geiman. I’ll quote the website about his work in collages, original paintings and constructions. “Produced from salvaged wood, found objects, and other recycled materials, Geiman’s eco-friendly artwork emerges from a folk art tradition infused with a contemporary, urban style.” His unique studio was recently featured on Design*Sponge.

My pick today is admittedly biased because my sister and Dolan have been life and business partners for quite a few years now. BUT, I insist that I would love Dolan’s mixed media artwork even if he wasn’t part of the family. Dolan’s art is “Contemporary Art with a Southern Accent,” which to me, means that his work tells a a really good story about rural America, deep family roots and our shared cultural history. Rescued wood constructions include this Great Dane, featured on Planet Green’s Total Wrecklamation.

Recently, Box Prints of Dolan’s artwork have become available as an affordable option for buying unique artwork (instead of mass-produced artwork at big home stores). Box Prints are high-quality reproductions printed DIRECTLY onto wood panels, instead of paper prints mounted to wood. These wood panels can then be mounted directly onto the wall without the need for a frame! These box prints can even be dusted and lightly wiped. Did I mention they look awesome? Here are a few of my current favorites:

Full Project Tutorials

So you’ve decided to redecorate a room (or even the whole house), but you’re on a shoestring budget. The best way to spruce up your home without spending a lot is to roll up your sleeves and get crafty! With just a few basic skills and materials, you can make beautiful decorations for your […]